Tom stepped off the road onto a space on the grounds of the aquarium, on the other side of the parking lot. In summer this was a pleasant-enough space with a little bridge over a carefully directed, and probably entirely artificial, small stream, trees, flowers, benches. Right then it was a winter wonderland, with icicles dripping off the trees and slippery ice underfoot.
Tom fished in his jeans pocket, thinking it was Kyrie, and answered the phone, his half-frozen fingers fumbling with the buttons.
"Tom?"
"Dad?"
"Oh, good. I have been delayed at the airport again. Something about flights to Denver being cancelled. Look, I really need you to go there, and to wait in the loft for the cable guy."
"Dad!" Tom turned around, to look at the frozen river. He had a feeling he'd heard something move or slither down there. It couldn't be water. That would be frozen. So what could it be?
"No. You see, I wouldn't ask if it were just because I want to watch TV, but in the beginning, at least, I'm going to be working from home, and I need the cable connection for the internet."
"Dad, I can't get to Denver," Tom said, drily, keeping his teeth from knocking together by an effort of will.
"Why not? How long would it take you to fly there? It's only a three-hour drive away. Flying couldn't be more than twenty minutes."
"Flying in the current blizzard would probably take about three hours," Tom said. He felt suddenly very tired. "And besides . . . look, I just can't."
"You know, I don't ask you to do this stuff every day," Edward Ormson said, in an aggrieved tone, from the other end of the connection. "It's just that this is really important to me, and I thought . . . Well, I thought our relationship was better these days."
Their relationship was better these days. Tom was very conscious that no matter what bad parents his parents might have been, he had been a truly horrible son, himself. And he owed his father for The George. "If I could at all, I would, Dad. It's just that I'm in the middle of a big mess just now."
"A mess? What type of a mess? Anything legal?"
His father was a corporate lawyer, and clearly, just now, a hammer in search of a nail.
"No," Tom said. "Look, it's just . . . not something I feel comfortable discussing on the phone."
"Did you eat someone?"
Tom dropped the phone. It went tumbling down over the brick parapet of the bridge and hit the river below with a hard thud. Under the bridge, there was that sound as if something had moved or slithered. It was so faint, that Tom couldn't be sure it had happened or if his half-frozen ears were giving him back impossible phantom sounds.